John Atherton

Shotgun Hunting Abstract with Shooting Bullseye

1949

An intriguing and complex composition composed of guns, rifles, ammo and a bullseye. Work is housed in a rustic Heydenryk frame.

With Abstract Expressionist painting, one could argue that the earlier, the more historically important. This stunning non-objective action painting is characterized by vast swaths o...

The artist has painted the work in matte black and gloss black. It a sense this is also an optical art “Op Art” in that it changes as the light changes. Jimmy Ernst was a major figure of the New York School of abstract painting and part of The Irascibles, and son of Max Ernst: Provenance: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, New York; Joseph H. Hirshhorn, New York and Washington, D.C. (acquired from the above in 1966); Joseph H. Hirshhorn bequest, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., 1981; Sotheby's Arcade, New York, New York, February 24, 1995, lot 331; The Jeanne and Carroll Berry...

Acrylic on masonite. This is a pivotal work in deep and radiant cobalt blue from 1950. It dipicts calligraphic and hieroglyph structures over a grid and pyramidal base by the first generation abstract expressionist. Provenance: Skinner: November 13, 1992 [Lot 00219}, The entry in the Skinner catalog indicates that the painting came directly from the artist to the family of the consignor to Skinner. Kaminsky Auctions. There is an unbroken paper trail that traces the ownership of the painting from the current owner, through two auction houses to the artist. Perfect unbroken provenance. Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a reflection of what he called   "the concealed power of the spirit," he said, “not of the brute physical form."   His was not aiming for a singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and exploration is this  painting  Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34 years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American painting, Betty Parsons.  
A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born artist.  He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Both contain fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility, Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal, but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color.  The painting’s imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors, cobalt blue and white all outlined in black.  Pousette-Dart symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows:  blue is ground, white is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle...

This is a beautiful 20th-century Russian Art Deco cubist gouache painting on cardboard. There is no obvious signature on the artwork. Although this painting is a typical example of t...

One of the most confounding paintings in this exhibition is “The Painting, As Seen by the Wall”. Mastromatteo depicts a bare canvas, framed in reverse, turned-around. He presents the...

"White Picket Fence (Aspirational Memoir)" is inspired by Toni Morison's The Bluest Eye. The focal point is a bright green square, encased with a picket- fence made of white tape. Inside the square is an old page torn from a “Dick and Jane...

"Funky Geometry" is an abstract painting diptych by Spanish artist Natalia Roman. It is a beautiful combination of geometric shapes in a classy gamut of colors. The use of pastel ton...